Coronavirus VS Global Military Expenditures

Coronavirus VS Global Defense Spending

The combined global defense expenditures are more than 2 trillion, spend every year on defense forces and military equipment. Simply it would not be wrong to say that humans spend this money to protect themselves from human beings.    

  Anyhow, in the history of mankind, man has not been the greatest enemy of man, actually pandemics and diseases are the greatest enemies of Homo sapiens (human beings). Pandemics and non-communicable diseases are the leading causes of human deaths.

 Surprisingly, the number of military manpower in the world was 20.5 million by 2006. And it has gradually increased up till now. In comparison, the number of doctors in the world in 2016 was only 10 million, according to the WHO. And there is currently a shortage of 4.5 million doctors and health workers in the world. 40% of countries have only 10 doctors for every 10,000 people.

 The total number of deaths due to all pandemic diseases in human history is more than 1000 million.

 Worldwide, nine of the top ten causes of human deaths are non-communicable diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, cancer, lungs related and respiratory diseases. In 2016, 71% of the total deaths in the world were due to these diseases, almost 41 million people died due to these diseases. In the same year 4 million people died due to pandemics, like HIV, TB etc. Details of pandemic diseases in human history are shared at the end of this article.

 The amount spent each year on medical research around the world to fight these pandemics and diseases is approximately just one-fourth of the world's total military expenditure. And of that, about 52% is owned by the private medical industry.

  If Homo sapiens spends the same military expenditure on medical research, especially on genetic engineering, to fight pandemics and diseases instead of investing for their own destruction, we may be able to make our future generations much stronger and safer. In future we may be able to create such immunity in body, through genetic engineering within human genes, and by alteration in white blood cells, so that they can detect and destroy today's viruses such as AIDS and any future virus that enters in human body at early stages. Our immune system is probably not as developed as it should be with the environmental and social changes in nature.

 There are also many viruses that once entered the human body, our immune system does not even know that a new virus has entered the body. When the immune system detects that a virus has entered the human body, by then it is too late. At that stage, the symptoms of the disease starts to appear, then it becomes almost impossible to save a person's life because the virus has already changed the genetic code of more than 90% of the genes in the human body. We need a lot of research on genetic engineering for human survival.

 Otherwise, it is so much possible that in the future there might be a pandemic like Coronavirus which would be much more dangerous than Coronavirus. It is possible that the outbreak could be as severe as the outbreak of coronavirus, but the virus could be so dangerous that the death toll could be much higher than the covid-19. It is not at all impossible for such pandemic to spread.

 There are some countries whose military budget is more than the total health budget. But they are all developing or under developed countries.

 Health budget of developed countries is excellently maintained, as in the United States about 10,000 dollars are spent on a person's health annually. The United States is the only country in world whose health budget is almost half of the world's total health budget. More than 3.5 trillion is spent on healthcare each year.

 But the tragedy here is that the money spent on research in the health sector is only a quarter of the world's total military expenditure.

  Hundreds of millions of people in the world die every year due to hunger and various diseases. While governments are only interested in the defense industry.

 According to a UNICEF report, 9 million children die due to hunger every year, on average almost one child per 10 seconds. At present, a total of 822 million children in the world are suffering from malnutrition. According to the status of 2018, about 5.4 million children died before reaching the age of five.

 If we want to keep our future generations safe, we want to give them better life. Where Homo sapiens can live a good life. Then, the world would have to form a global government. A global government in which the sovereignty of all countries would be maintained, but global government must be independent in delivering health, education and food equally to the whole world, and it may not have to face any resistance from countries. In simple words, the global government will not be bound by the policies of local state governments on food, education and health, but all countries will have to abide by the policies of these related international ministries.

Details of deadliest pandemics

Name	Time period	Type / Pre-human host	Death toll
Antonine Plague	165-180	Believed to be either smallpox or measles	5M
Japanese smallpox epidemic	735-737	Variola major virus	1M
Plague of Justinian	541-542	Yersinia pestis bacteria / Rats, fleas	30-50M
Black Death	1347-1351	Yersinia pestis bacteria / Rats, fleas	200M
New World Smallpox Outbreak	1520 – onwards	Variola major virus	56M
Great Plague of London	1665	Yersinia pestis bacteria / Rats, fleas	100,000
Italian plague	1629-1631	Yersinia pestis bacteria / Rats, fleas	1M
Cholera Pandemics 1-6	1817-1923	V. cholerae bacteria	1M+
Third Plague	1885	Yersinia pestis bacteria / Rats, fleas	12M (China and India)
Yellow Fever	Late 1800s	Virus / Mosquitoes	100,000-150,000 (U.S.)
Russian Flu	1889-1890	Believed to be H2N2 (avian origin)	1M
Spanish Flu	1918-1919	H1N1 virus / Pigs	40-50M
Asian Flu	1957-1958	H2N2 virus	1.1M
Hong Kong Flu	1968-1970	H3N2 virus	1M
HIV/AIDS	1981-present	Virus / Chimpanzees	25-35M
Swine Flu	2009-2010	H1N1 virus / Pigs	200,000
SARS	2002-2003	Coronavirus / Bats, Civets	770
Ebola	2014-2016	Ebolavirus / Wild animals	11,000
MERS	2015-Present	Coronavirus / Bats, camels	850
COVID-19	2019-Present	Coronavirus – Unknown (possibly pangolins)	319,200 (Johns Hopkins University estimate as of May 19, 2020)